The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived

by Tom Shroder

  Every name on that plaque belonged to a direct ancestor. Some fragment of the essence of all those named there, the sequence of chemical compounds that program the production of everything that makes a person who they are, from cuticles to cerebellum, was now running in my blood, pumping through my heart, inhabiting every cell of my skin. Across the water up on a hill, the sign said, was the original family homestead built by Joseph Bone. I later found a photograph of that house from the 1870s in which, from a distance, you could see a lone male figure standing somberly to the side and a small girl playing on the porch. It had to be one of the earlier photographs of such an iconic American scene. How strange that the man was my three-times great-grandfather Joseph Bone, and the little girl was my great-great-grandmother Evalyn Bone.

  I’ve always thought of myself as an East Coast kind of guy. But here I was now, in the heart of the heart of Middle America, standing on ground sacred to those who had brought me into being. This quiet spot on the banks of a brown river was as much my place as any place in the world.

  It doesn’t make much sense at first, does it? Before I began doing this research, I didn’t even know most of these people existed. So why was I feeling such a powerful connection? I spent a lot of time casting around through the research heavily featuring that tidbit about genealogical research being second only to pornography in Web hits.

  Caring about our ancestors may be ubiquitous these days, but it sure isn’t new. In Chronicles of the Old Testament, lineages are detailed back twenty-three generations. Matthew and Luke went to great trouble—complicated by the Virgin birth doctrine—to trace Jesus’s lineage not only to God the Father, but through Mary to the Jewish King David. Throughout history, and prehistory, humans have benefited or suffered for the deeds or sins of their ancestors—inheriting not only genetic traits but wealth or poverty, social standing and reputation. In language after language, the family name contains a prefix or suffix meaning “son of”: -fitz in Irish, -son in English and Swedish, -ovich in Russian, ibn in Arabic, Mc- or Mac- in Scottish, -ides in Greek, -ez in Spanish, -wicz in Polish, -oglu in Turkish, -zadeh in Persian. Even preliterate societies—with no Bibles to write down the names of past generations—often had individuals specializing in memorizing lineages, if not full-blown ancestor cults. The idea that relations were somehow “in your blood” predated by centuries the biological understanding that DNA was passed along through the union of sperm and egg cells.

  As with the claim that Jesus descended from King David—a prerequisite for the prophesied Jewish Messiah—knowing your ancestry has always been a potential leg up for the current generation, whether to legitimize royalty or just ownership of the lower forty.

  But we all know the feeling is at least as much emotional as practical. It’s easy to speculate that the origin of the bonds of family predate even modern humans; a connection initially forged by the flood of powerful hormones surging in the brain and body—of both mother and father—set off by the birth of a baby and the process of caring for it thereafter. The hormone cocktail incites feelings of closeness, trust, and bondedness that can last a lifetime, making the parent-child nexus a focal point of safety and trust in a hostile world. That love and dependence is projected both into the past in our caring for long-dead ancestors, and into the future, in our concern about descendants not yet born.

  The profound psychological impact of ancestry has been cleverly highlighted by recent research at Emory University, where randomly selected children were tested on how much they knew about their ancestors. Then researchers gave them a wide range of diagnostic tests. The overwhelming result: The more children knew about their family history, the better they scored on measures of psychological health, well-being, and adaptability. Perhaps even more impressive, children who learned about their ancestors during the study improved their test results. Other research shows that adult subjects randomly assigned to think about their ancestry before taking a test performed better on it than control groups given no such instruction.

  But standing there on an Iowa patch of green grass, watching that brown river flow, I didn’t really feel smarter or more adaptable. What I felt was . . . peace.

  —

  I could have stayed there for hours, but our tour guides were urging us on, back into town to the main attraction—a stone monument in the middle of the city’s largest park. Set in the stone was another plaque, this one bronze, containing quotes from my grandfather expressing his love for Webster City. It ended, In my own time, let my ashes prosper in my own good soil.

  As I looked down on the embossed bronze plaque, set in a table-size slab of concrete, I thought of a letter Irene had sent to a friend in Webster City sometime after the monument had been dedicated in the summer of 1976. “It was grievous to remember the services held at the dedication, for Mack was a very sick man and I wondered whether he would be able to finish his speech.”

  Now I realized that I was standing in the same spot he had undoubtedly stood during that speech, so ill and struggling to keep upright. I felt a sadness that seemed somehow to emerge from the ground beneath my feet and seep through my body.

  My whole life I’ve had the feeling that the physical location of significant events somehow retained some of the energy of what had happened there. I’d discovered Mack felt the same way. I remembered the letter he wrote about getting the inspiration to write Long Remember, the “emotional wallop” he said he’d felt when he stood on the battlefield at Gettysburg and how the image of his headlights sweeping across the gravestones of the fallen kept him from sleeping that night.

  As it happened, gravestones were the next stop on our tour. Graceland Cemetery meanders along a wooded creek bed for three-quarters of a mile, a gentle slope of lawn studded with mature pine trees. I’d recently found a note Mack had written in one of his story collections talking about a visit to Webster City when he’d stopped at Graceland: “I went back there at sunset one June evening, tired and sick at heart. I had spent the week in Des Moines looking after the funeral services of one of my best friends. When it was all over, instead of catching a plane back East, I drove seventy miles to the plot of ground where my mother and grandparents lay. I stopped beside the lot, then walked over to the hilltop and flung myself flat on the grass, gazing through the dusk at the little bed in the creek where we boys used to swim. . . . I can swear to it: there was an actual force, a comforting vigor that flowed out of that soil into my body as I lay there.”

  In a letter about another Webster City visit, he said, “I strolled through Graceland Cemetery as I always love to do when I’m there. One of these times, I suppose I’ll go to Graceland without strolling, but Jesus please wait on that one.”

  Jesus waited only a distressingly brief eleven years, but Irene delayed things for two more. Mack was cremated after a grim ceremony in Sarasota of which I remember very little. My daughter had been born just three days before Mack died, and I was in a fog of sleep deprivation and emotion. My only clear recollection is sitting beside Irene in a front row of folding chairs, uncomfortably aware of her lack of presence. She had been released from the hospital barely in time for the service. In the hours leading up to it, she had railed about “Mack’s desertion” and shuffled around pitiably, lost and uncomprehending. The shock of surgery and her emotional collapse had set her up to fail. Overmedication in the hospital did the rest, precipitating psychosis. A new doctor, horrified by the combination of pills my grandmother had been given, stopped the medication cold. We hoped she might come out of it then, but weeks went by with no improvement. When it seemed past the point of hope, my mom and Tim had to make another awful decision, this time to put their addled mother in a nursing home.

  Irene had no reaction when her children explained what they had decided. They arrived at the home and she shuffled obediently into the lobby on Tim’s arm. It was a clean but clearly institutional place. Her head swiveled to the left, then the right, as if noticing
her surroundings for the first time. She dropped Tim’s arm, turned around, and shuffled back to the car.

  The next morning, for the first time since she’d broken her wrist, she made breakfast for herself in her own home. Three weeks later, because she disapproved of the stuffing Tim intended to make, she cooked the Christmas turkey and all the fixings using her own recipes.

  She progressed from there, but it took two years before she could deal with arranging the gravestone engravings and shipping Mack’s ashes. Now, presumably, they lay beneath my feet by the marker that said, MACKINLAY KANTOR, SINGER OF SONGS, TELLER OF TALES, “FOREVER WALKING FREE.”

  I thought that last was a nice sentiment, but wasn’t sure why it was in quotes. Turns out it was even more fitting than I imagined, and in an unexpected way.

  “Forever Walking Free” was the name of a short story Mack had written during the war, about an American airman meeting a pretty, blond English girl named Joan during a German air raid in London. When the bombs fall silent, he invites her to an off-limits supper club called the Blue Polly, with “swell liquor, swell food, and doubtless plenty more of those peppery American cigarettes”—all items hard to come by legitimately in wartime London. There’s music, dancing, and lots of drinking. Joan’s resolve not to be an easy pickup is dissolving when she realizes that the name of the “base” her American said he was stationed at—Brookwood—was actually a cemetery, and that he’s dead, and so is she.

  In his notes on that story, Mack conceded that some readers might be offended by the idea. “Would this author have us believe that heaven is a saloon?” he asks on their behalf, and immediately supplies the answer. “Indeed, even heaven may assume the form of the Blue Polly on occasion; possibly the seraphim are sometimes named Joan, and have beds in Bloomsbury. If so, I can think of no future satisfaction more agreeable.”

  So perhaps Mack now rests with a bottle and a babe in a bed in Bloomsbury, forever walking free.

  Returning to downtown Webster City, we stopped into the Mornin Glory, a surprisingly lively coffee shop in this Starbuckless city where it seemed the entire citizenry met to plan or recap the day. Yes, thank God, they had espresso drinks. It turned out that, in the reflected glory of my ancestry, and because I had spoken at the community auditorium the previous evening, even I was a minor celebrity here. After the talk, an eighty-six-year-old woman approached me to say that, when Mack had returned to Webster City for a summer in 1938, she had come around to play with my mom and Tim. Well—she corrected herself—really, it was just Tim. My mother wouldn’t have much to do with her because she was older. I did the math. “But she was only eleven months older than you,” I said.

  “Well, she was much taller.”

  During this conversation she had been nervously fidgeting with a manila envelope. Now, hesitantly, she handed it to me. Inside, she said, were clips of my grandfather’s that her even older neighbor, now ninety-one, had been keeping since she was a little girl, impressed by the local boy who’d made good.

  “She’s just held on to them all these years, but she thinks that you might make more use of them now,” the woman said, sounding personally unconvinced.

  I unsealed the envelope and gingerly slid out the brittle newsprint. I stared, disbelieving. It was a ninety-four-year-old section of The Des Moines Register featuring the winner of its 1921 short story contest: “Purple,” the very first story my grandfather ever published.

  The next morning at the café, another woman who recognized me from the talk wanted me to know that, every Memorial Day, she put flowers on my grandfather’s grave, because that’s what her late father had always done.

  I’d noticed a group of women in their fifties talking and laughing at a large table in the middle of the shop. From what I could overhear of the conversation, they were planning a fortieth high school reunion. Now one of them, a slim, youthful brunette, got up and came over. “Your grandfather put me in a book,” she announced.

  Really? I said. What book?

  “It was called Hamilton County. I have the picture here.” She opened a box sitting on her table and pulled out an image of a group of teens standing in a school hallway. One of them, a cute brunette with the exact same short bob haircut as the woman holding the photograph, and obviously her younger self, was talking and gesturing with animation.

  I recognized it instantly as the image for which my grandfather had commissioned me to write imagined “teen” dialogue in 1970. I even remembered the first line, and why wouldn’t I? They were the first words I was ever paid to write: “You should have heard what Barbara said. . . .” I hoped that forty-five years was not too long to wait to apologize for putting words in her mouth.

  Not much later, yet another citizen sought me out—an older man who wanted me to know that his former business partner hosted Mack on one of his triumphant returns to Webster City. “They got roaring drunk, as usual,” he said, smirking slightly. “Mack went out to piss and passed out on the lawn, and in the morning there was a knock on the door. The garbageman . . .”

  I knew the end to that story.

  Apparently, however, Mack’s public drunkenness didn’t stop the county from naming a road after him. It’s a ruler-straight highway on the edge of town lined by fields of corn—which would have tickled the 1970s critic who had called Mack’s short stories “boiled-and-buttered native corn, fresh from the can.”

  And it didn’t stop one of the teachers at the fine new high school from assigning this unlikely scenario as an essay prompt:

  “You’re on the subway in New York and you begin talking to your seatmate. You exchange pleasantries, and you’ve just informed them that you are from Webster City. Your new friend says, ‘Isn’t that the town that MacKinlay Kantor is from?’”

  In the New York subway system, do people really exchange pleasantries and have ready knowledge of my grandfather?

  As Hemingway put it at the end of his first novel, “Isn’t it pretty to think so.”

  —

  For sixteen years, my brother and his family have lived in a home he built in Sarasota, just two minutes from where Mack and Irene lived. I’ve visited frequently, but never once looked in on the old house—I wasn’t sure I wanted contemporary reality to intrude on memory. Now, curiosity, plus the fact that I was writing this book, made me feel I had to.

  I looked up property records and found a phone number for the current owner, a woman living there alone. When I called and told her who my grandfather was, she immediately said, “He was mean as a snake.”

  I was more amused than offended. I knew my grandfather, and all his moods, pretty well by now. It turned out this wasn’t her firsthand opinion, but commentary from an elderly tradesman she’d met who had done work for Mack in the day. Plus, and this would have annoyed my grandfather spectacularly, she was a raging liberal, unforgiving of what she knew about his politics.

  In any case, she was gracious enough to invite me to stop by, which Lisa and I did on a warm September morning. The address is Shell Road, but Shell Road no longer exists, thanks in part to my efforts. Mack had for years railed in letters to the editor and to county officials about the annoyance of tourists driving through what he considered his backyard—Shell Road, which indeed was made of crushed shell, ran across his property, separating his lawn from the beachfront. Heavy rains and erosion caused potholes to form, which the county was habitually slow to repair. Mack decided that it was his prerogative as a homeowner to declare the road abandoned.

  One afternoon—I must have been home from college—I had a message from him, asking me to stop by. When I arrived, he had a posthole digger and some palm logs stacked up, each about four feet long. I dragged the logs out to the road. Mack took a few bites with the digger, then apologized for his bad back and handed it to me. When I’d dug down deep enough, we both wrestled the logs into the hole—making sure that at least two feet of each log end stuck up f
rom the surface. Et voilà, a sturdy palisade blocked the road on either side of his property. From that moment forward, not another car would ever pass behind my grandfather’s house. He offered me a beer and fixed himself a cocktail. We sat on the patio, toasting the success of our rebellion.

  I was remembering this, wishing we’d had more moments like it, as Lisa and I turned off Higel Avenue—the main road heading south on the Key—onto the still jungle-canopied driveway. This had always been how I’d approached his house, and at first it was surprisingly and reassuringly familiar, until we slammed to a halt at a structure I didn’t recognize. It took me a while to get my bearings, to realize that encroachments from the new homes to either side, where the buffer of untouched jungle had been sold off piecemeal, had pushed the entrance drive to the wrong side of the carport. The driveway I remembered, the one where I rode my first two-wheeled bicycle early on a Christmas morning more than fifty years before, no longer existed. Neither did the screened entrance terrace, which had been covered with a roof and enclosed, as had the back terrace overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. The living space, always filled with frond-filtered light and open to the outside, now seemed dark, hunkered down, cluttered. His den had been chopped up, with a bathroom and storage closets intruding on what had once been an expansive, regal rectangular space. It all felt so shrunken. But for the coquina rock fireplace and the black slate floors, I would have doubted it was the same house.